Thinkers Timeline

Al-Biruni was a Central Asian polymath. The word 'polymath' means a person with deep knowledge in many fields. He worked as an astronomer, mathematician, geographer, historian, anthropologist, geologist, and physicist. He was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. He was born in 973 CE in Khwarezm, a region near the Aral Sea in what is now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He died around 1048 CE. He came from a family of modest means. He was orphaned young. He was lucky. A prince of the local royal family took him in and arranged for his education. He studied under leading scholars of his region. By his twenties he was already corresponding with other major scholars across the Muslim world. In 1017, his life changed dramatically. The Turkic ruler Mahmud of Ghazni invaded Khwarezm. Al-Biruni was taken east, to the Ghaznavid empire's capital in what is now Afghanistan. He was effectively a captive scholar. The Ghaznavids treated him reasonably well but kept him from going home. He spent the rest of his life in their service. The move had one extraordinary side effect. Mahmud's armies regularly raided into India. Al-Biruni travelled with them. He used the opportunity to study Indian language, religion, philosophy, and science directly. He learned Sanskrit. He read Indian astronomical and mathematical texts. He talked with Hindu scholars. He wrote a book called the India, one of the most careful studies of one civilisation by a thinker from another that has ever been written. He wrote about 150 books over his career. Around 25 survive. He wrote about astronomy, the calendar, mineralogy, pharmacy, mathematics, geography, and history. He died around age 75, still working.

Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a physicist and chemist born in Warsaw, Poland, at a time when Poland was occupied by Russia and women were barred from higher education. She moved to Paris to study science, earned degrees in both physics and mathematics, and went on to become the most celebrated scientist of her era. She discovered two elements — polonium and radium — developed the theory of radioactivity, and won the Nobel Prize twice: in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911. She remains the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in two different sciences. She died of aplastic anaemia caused by her lifelong exposure to radiation — a danger she helped to discover but could not protect herself against.

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is widely seen as the most influential scientist of the twentieth century. He was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany. His family was secular Jewish and middle class. His father ran an electrochemical business that often struggled. His mother was a musician who pushed Albert to play the violin from age five. He had one younger sister, Maja. As a child, he was shy and slow to speak, but fascinated by science. A compass given to him at age five made him wonder about invisible forces. He found regular school dull. At sixteen he ran away from his German school. He finished his education in Switzerland and entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1896. He graduated in 1900. He could not find a teaching post and took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. There, in his spare time, he produced his most famous work. In 1905, his 'miracle year', he published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equation E=mc². Fame followed slowly. He held professorships in Zurich, Prague, and Berlin. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. Einstein, who was Jewish, was already in the United States and never returned to Germany. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked until his death on 18 April 1955, aged 76.

Vandana Shiva (born 1952) is an Indian physicist, environmental activist, and philosopher. She was born in Dehradun in the foothills of the Himalayas, into a family with deep connections to forests and farming. She studied physics at university and completed a doctorate in the philosophy of science at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She then returned to India and made a decision that changed the direction of her life: she left academic science to work with the Chipko movement, a grassroots movement in which Indian village women embraced trees to prevent them being cut down by commercial loggers. This experience convinced her that the most important environmental battles were being fought not in laboratories or conference rooms but in the fields and forests where ordinary people, particularly women, lived and worked. She founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and later Navdanya, an organisation that works to protect seed diversity and support small farmers. She has received the Alternative Nobel Prize and many other awards and is one of the most recognised voices in global debates about food, farming, and the natural world.

Narges Mohammadi (born 1972) is an Iranian physicist, journalist, and human rights activist. She is one of Iran's most prominent advocates for the abolition of the death penalty and for women's rights. She has been arrested multiple times by the Iranian government, sentenced to decades in prison, and has spent much of her adult life behind bars for her peaceful activism. In 2023 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving her current prison sentence — making her one of the very few Nobel laureates to receive the prize while imprisoned. Her husband and two children live in exile in France.